The Man Who Broke Ratchet in Half

if you've been following this channel for a while you may know the story of tuval the man who broke spyro in half a prolific speedrunner and glitch hunter who was able to find all of the original spyro game's major sequence breaks and set incredible world records you wouldn't think an insane accomplishment like this could be replicated but it turns out that a similar story took place in the earlier days of a different insomniac title this is the story of the most important ratchet and clank speedrunner of all time a mysterious character whose influence was so great they changed the way an entire game was being played let's dive in to begin our story we need to go back to where many speedrun stories begin the start of the twitch era 2012-2014 at this point the playstation speedrunning community was very small maybe 50 to 100 people or so so you can imagine the ratchet community was only a small branch off of that the majority of this community had their focus on routing and optimizing the first game in the series which left the sequels largely untapped for potential ratchet and clank 3 up your arsenal or ouya for short is one of the series fan favorites and would see some activity in the early years there was a 2005 sda any percent run by cannibal k9 which was kind of just the one and done a handful of glitch videos on youtube here and there but not much to speak of in 2013 though two runners were here to stay and you may have heard of them zem and insomniac nintendo zem was the first person to pick up the pieces from where cannibal k9 left off in 2005 improving on the oh so outdated 2 22 38 to 152.38 a straight half hour improvement in january 2013. he would continue to lower the time with 149.29 14417 and 139.37 ayan would join the fray in september of 2013 and improve on zem's time with 138 flat and 133 33 where the record would sit for a long time as the community was approaching 2014 ratchet and clank 1 new game plus was starting to be seen as the main category of the entire ratchet series the run started from a file that already had all of the game's weapons and enough bolts to beat the game which meant that the focus was more on the movement and tricks starting with items like the pda gave runners an infinite jump which was used from time to time and was a really cool discovery bottom line rack one ng plus was the hottest on the market it was experiencing a golden age where new things were being discovered constantly and everyone was loving it but this raised a good question could up your arsenal have an ng plus category that's just as dope starting with all the weapons leveled up sounds cool and you begin the game with the charge boots which is a huge speed upgrade making the start of the run much faster than any percent ayan decided to give ouya ng plus a whirl and just to be the first to get a time on the leaderboards you're gonna have to excuse the bit rate on this run we're dealing with some vintage gamer footage it's pretty old anyway throughout the run the main movement he was utilizing were thruster pack long jumps for smaller gaps and the charge boots for longer stretches when you double tap r1 you charge forward at full speed but if you let go you'll come to a screeching halt if you keep holding r1 ratchet will continue forwards but the charge boot speed will slow down this means that the best strategy is just to spam r1 to restart the charge every time you start to slow down maintaining the full speed you can also cancel the boots at any time by firing your weapon so you don't have to worry about playing the entire charge boot animation out in's approach was more or less just any percent with the charge boots and better weapons for the bosses even so the time save was immediately obvious the movement of weapons were a huge bonus and new game plus playthroughs allow you to skip playing through the 5 quark vid comics ion would achieve 109 17 and ng plus in december 2013 and 2 months later 102 48. other runners would take notice of ayan optimizing up your arsenal nuka who was primarily a ratchet 1 runner found the ratchet 3 ng plus run to be too bland and too similar to any percent there was definitely potential for more but where was he going to find it at this point in time the community was made up of almost entirely north americans with the exception of a few europeans and not many of them were interested in ratchet 3. it was time to look elsewhere this is when nuka had a thought what if anyone else in the world is speedrunning ratchet he took to youtube and typed in ratchet and clank 3 speedrun and found nothing out of the ordinary he tried again but put those exact words through google translate to japanese what he would discover was a run 20 minutes faster than ayan's time this was the first time the western community would lay eyes on one of the most historically significant ratchet speedruns ever the man the myth the legend it's silence baby [Music] [Music] [Music] the entire community was literally floored by the skill of this mysterious player the amount of stuff to unpack from a single run was overwhelming this run was actually from may of 2013 which means the western community had been going about their day with the video hiding in plain sight for 10 months this guy who nobody had heard of before had literally beaten ratchet 3 ng plus over an hour faster than zem's any percent time 2 months prior i'm sure a lot of questions are running through your mind but now you know how the community felt when they first saw the time so why is this run so much faster and how is he able to save so much time let's go through the run one thing at a time and see if we can figure it out together the first thing that is an immediate improvement over ion's runs is his movement silence was able to crack the charge boots wide open and discover new movement techniques he found a way to utilize ratchet's normal moveset while traveling with the speed gained from the charge boots i've already mentioned earlier how when you let the charge boot animation play out or shoot during the charge the game sends you into a screeching halt if you tap l1 during the state which is the first person view button ratchet will do a small slide and this is referred to as a neutral the reason for the name is because you can turn this slide into multiple moves while retaining the charge boot speed but you will lose this speed unless you leave the analog stick in the neutral position the whole time this means you can neutral lag jump neutral wrench swing neutral double jump and most importantly neutral long jump which allows you to clear bigger gaps silence also found falling neutral long jumps which is the same concept but the speed can be stored if you hold the stick neutral as you fall out of a charge this wasn't the only way silence was able to convert charge boot speed into useful movement tech he also discovered the incredibly stylish technique known as hyper swing hovers by hooking onto a hyper swing note with charge boot speed and swinging all the way forward to the apex you can achieve a super fast hover if you let the analog stick go to neutral position yet again before pressing x to glide this was used at the end of vr training and on planet dax to get to the warship faster the biggest technique of all that silence was showcased in his 4158 is the whip jump [Music] that's right silence was able to find a way to do the grounded whip swing animation in mid air and long jump off of it you can cross extremely large caps with this technique and it was used multiple times in the run silence actually plays the entire run in lockstrafe mode rather than third person which is probably just how he's always played however he does have to swap to third person when performing whip jumps as they are frame perfect in lockstrafe the whip jump was used on crash site to get from the very start of the level to an elevator on the other side and once more on the way back to the ship which is still how it's done in runs today this method effectively allowed silence to take a b line straight to the end of the level and then straight back completing it all in just 35 seconds silence would also use the whip jump to discover one of the largest sequence breaks in the game vr early [Music] to the untrained eye this doesn't look all that game breaking it's just a whip jump from one area to another but if only you knew how much of the game this skips ratchet and clank 3 runs on a linear progression system where you complete one planet after another until you beat the game in a casual playthrough the chart shown on screen is more or less the intended order to get to the end upon completing annihilation nation the two next planets are aquatos and tyrannosis once you've beaten these you return to starship phoenix and helga has some new gadgets she wants you to test out in a virtual reality obstacle course upon reaching the end of the course you get the coordinates to planet dax where you move along in the game as intended the only known way to get into vr training at the time was the intended way through helga's teleporter which is only active once you've beaten tyranosis silence was able to discover that the vr simulation that helga teleports you to is actually stored in the starship phoenix map way out of bounds after silence completes velden and florana the first two planets he gets to the phoenix for the first time he gets the coordinates to marcadia which he needs for a visit later in the run and immediately heads out of bounds to get to vr early this is achieved by getting close to this silver pod in the corner and then clipping out of bounce with the mega turrets [Music] once out of bounds silence performs a very precise slope intercept which is a way of high jumping off of sloped surfaces you normally wouldn't be able to stand on afterwards there's not much of a visual cue to get into vr training so silence shoots the sniper rifle a couple times to make sure he's aiming in the right spot [Music] after completing a very precise whip jump into outer space the level pops into existence with this skip silence had completely eliminated equato's and tyranosis from the run the time save is difficult to estimate but we're definitely talking minutes probably over five following vr early silence does most of the planets in a completely different order dax normally the seventh planet casually is now done third right after vr to demonstrate how different this route is allow me to put it up for comparison [Music] yeah definitely a stark contrast i've spent most of my time discussing the left-hand side of the chart but a keen-eyed viewer may notice that aridia is missing on silence's route and that's because he managed to find a skip for that too aridia's only purpose in the game is to allow you to obtain the warp pad which is a gadget that allows you to solve specific puzzles this is used exclusively on quark's hideout so if there was a way to get to the end without needing the gadget you could skip iridium entirely now let's take a look at how silence did it [Music] [Music] this first neutral long jump is actually still done in runs today since it's the quickest way to get out of bounds the sloped terrain near the back end of cork's hut is extremely awkward to scale and silence opts to use the tyra guys to stabilize which was pretty unique for the time after this he enters the end of the level from behind and hotfolds it back to the ship on top of skipping planets silence would find many ways of skipping large chunks of the ones you do play he found a skip at the start of marcadia by charging off this egg looking thing to get to the ship on the other side and immediately begin the combat missions also on marcadia silence would find refractor skip the refractor is an item you mainly use on a binding gemini to redirect the laser around the map to lower a green force field silence found a clever clip through the force field using the tyra guys which skipped grabbing the refractor altogether he also found this barrier skip in the holostar clank section which skipped saving the gadgetbots a quick 15 seconds silence would discover some pretty big turret clips as well one hironobani draco skips you from the midpoint in the level to the end by charging through the air another one here at the end of velden skips the entire dogfight and gets you to the ship with a directional changing neutral long jump over the final gap and another one on the ratchet section of hollow star where you clip immediately after you spawn into the titanium bolt path which has a teleporter to your ship atop a magnet strip the final silence discovery i want to cover for now might not be the most game breaking or time saving but is one of the most creative skips he's come up with this one really showcases his big brain this is planet koros the penultimate level of the game your starting position is down here and you see that big turret way up there that's where the end of the level is the intended route has you walk your way around until you get to the interior of the turret but we all know that silence is gonna do something crazy [Music] yup four s eyes off of a wall that doesn't even look close to being a surface you can do it on he literally high jumps around the out of bounds part of the wall glides back into the wall and gets the crouching animation for a split second four times back to back this definitely took some out of the box thinking but at this point it should be very clear what kind of genius we're dealing with considering that he already found several insane skips at this point this one is just the cherry on top the inclusion of the new skips and movement tech made the run significantly harder turning it from any percent with the charge boots into a completely different beast even today ouya ng plus is still considered by the majority to be the most brutal category to compete in across the entire ratchet series when the community discovered silence is run they also stumbled upon a couple of his other videos silence was and is still known to make some of the greatest glitch compilations for ouya once again showcasing his great mind a handful of these were uploaded throughout 2013 all the way up into early 2014 right when the community discovered him while the community was in awe of his skill they weren't sure whether his 4158 was a single segment run or not as it was uploaded in multiple parts there was a language barrier so it was hard to tell since the super serious and professional google docs leaderboards of 2014 only tracked single segment runs they weren't sure whether it should be included silence would actually reply through the youtube comments and confirm the speculation that is 4158 was indeed a segmented run while this may have been disappointing for some silence was far from being done all of the glitch videos he'd been uploading throughout 2013 and early 2014 held a subtle message that he was still playing still finding glitches and still honing his skills to become the best this time silence was ready for round two he was gonna blow the world's mind once again and he was gonna do it single segment [Music] silence's first single segment run would result in a 42-23 a time only 25 seconds slower than his segment had run but silence didn't just want to get close he wanted to beat it [Music] silence had broken through the 40-minute barrier with 39-54 but the train wasn't stopping [Music] 37 46 was and still is silence's final time in up your arsenal june 6 2014 would be the last time silent would lower this coveted record the only notable improvements that silence incorporated over the months was a faster vr early that skipped the lengthy sis better routes on quarks hideout and metropolis swapping to the ps2 version which was a bit faster at the time and skipping the tier guys on annihilation nation the tyra guys was used in three places in the run and silence found a way to obsolete them all another huge chunk of his time save was from better movement silence was now noticeably better at retaining top speed doing the tricks he already knew with less setup and innovating new movement strings to get him through the game quicker [Music] silence had single-handedly turned a beloved childhood classic into one of the most high octane speed games on the playstation 2. the skill floor to learn even the most basic movements in the game is incredibly high it must have taken silence hours to master the movement and tricks and to become consistent at it all for anyone else to get on his level it came with the intimidating task of extracting the overload of information his runs contained our old moose friend in seemed up for the task impressively enough ayan would be the first western player that was able to learn the movement learn the tricks and follow silence's route pretty closely he would top out with a 4104 when silence had set a 3913 just a day prior a pretty good time but a bit less than two minutes off it's possible ayan could have competed with silence had he kept going but chose to focus on other categories instead xem would return to ouya in october of 2014 but had a lot of catching up to do in terms of knowledge ain and rak 1 runner slaughter would catch them up to date with silence and his enormous change of the game's meta zem would learn ratchet 3 new game plus from scratch and would embark on a 7 month long grind to take down silence which is a testament to how ahead of his time he really was while you may know zem for being the big personality that he is today these were some of his earliest streams with his veer account being between 5 and 20 but as he got better he would draw more attention and silence would be toppled once and for all with a 37-20 on april 2nd 2015. 2015 was also the year i got into the game and when i got a good grasp of the movement i decided to document the various groundwork silence had laid out in form of the ratchet and clank 3 movement guide this taught new players how to perform the techniques that silence had discovered years prior the video is fairly outdated so it remains unlisted but was the go-to tool for the time zem would go on to hold the record for a full six and a half years which is a story in and of itself it was actually beaten very recently in fact by tarna a polish runner who's been on zem's tale along with captain wiffel for years at this point this makes the ouya ng plus world record holder club very special and very small only reserved for the most dedicated runners and right now it sits at only four people with this guy right here being the main reason so many people run this game today while zem and others definitely helped spread the word about up your arsenal speedrunning the game would not sell itself if it wasn't for silence he is the one who created the movement system we know and love today and he's the one that found half of the tricks in the game that are still seeing use silence's influence was so monumental it would spawn immense optimization for ratchet 2 as well the movement system is very similar in rack 2 and tricks like whip jumping with the wrench became stable tech that is used to this day after silence stopped doing runs in mid 2014 he would still continue to upload glitch compilation videos for ratchet 3 with the occasional deadlocked video as well 2018 would be the last time we would hear from silence he has not uploaded a video in three and a half years silence is a bit of a mysterious character he emerged from the shadows posted groundbreaking videos and vanished completely few things are known about this guy since there is a language barrier after all but what we do know is that he was intelligent innovative and incredibly skilled some community members speculate that silence couldn't have been doing it all by himself and that there was a small japanese community that were working things out together some speculate that silence was incredibly skilled at ouya multiplayer which has a hardcore fan base filled with players who all have incredibly good movement lag jumping was actually discovered on multiplayer but most of the other tech used in speedruns isn't possible here because you're missing clank on your back japan also never had uya multiplayer available to play for the public which means that silence couldn't have been playing it it's possible he was playing it with a ton of friends offline but i'd say that's a stretch what's more plausible is that silence was an avid glitch hunter and was inspired by older glitch videos uploaded in the early days of youtube this theory is by far and large the most conceivable and is backed up by this youtube comment replying to old school glitch hunter chidori where it states that he used to watch his glitch hunting videos all the way back in 2008. silence never joined the community skype group or the discord when that was being created so we have very little information to go off of while we may not know a lot about the person behind these findings we know a lot about what they did to the game what presumably started as curiosity for an old game led to one man laying the groundwork for an incredible speedrun while the world record is now 10 minutes faster you gotta pay respect when it's due it's safe to say that we wouldn't have a run this optimized and difficult if it wasn't for silence whether or not he may show up again one day the community is eternally grateful for everything he did [Music] thanks for watching and special thanks to my patrons shown on screen if you wish to support the channel you can chip in a couple bucks a month to get your name shown on screen in the next video as always take care and have a good one [Music]

Channel: ThaRixer

Views: 89,874

Rating: 4.9596152 out of 5

Keywords: Ratchet, Ratchet and clank, Clank, speedrun, speed, run, glitches, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Insomniac Games, ps1, ps2, playstation, playstation 2, silence, xem, xem92, tharixer, ricky, play, station, playstation 3, insomniac, insomniac games, speedrunning, skip, glitch, exploit, sequence break, speedrunning content, The man who broke ratchet in half, the man who broke spyro in half, Ratchet & clank, Rivet, movement, tricks, game, gamer

Id: DcHdXSzo-F0

Length: 24min 55sec (1495 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/blond-max]

must watch video period.

If the is a speedrunning HoF, silence is first ballot no question